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I paint the way I do because I can keep on putting more and more things in - like drama, pain, anger, love, a figure, a horse, my ideas of space. It doesn't matter if it differs from mine, as long as it comes from the painting, which has its own integrity and intensity.

Willem de Kooning

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Willem de Kooning
Age: 92 †
Born: 1904
Born: April 24
Died: 1997
Died: March 19
Artist
Designer
Drawer
Painter
Sculptor
University Teacher
R'dam
Willem De Kooning
Willem DeKooning
William de Kooning
Willem Dekooning
willem de kooning
Long
Painting
Anger
Way
Space
Figure
Things
Pain
Paint
Love
Comes
Drama
Like
Keep
Mines
Differs
Doesn
Horse
Intensity
Ideas
Mine
Putting
Matter
Figures
Integrity

More quotes by Willem de Kooning

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The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all your time.
Willem de Kooning
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The point they (Lissitzky, Rodchenko, Tatlin, Gabo, the neo-Plasticists, and so on) all had in common was to be inside and outside at the same time. For me, to be inside and outside is to be in an unheated studio with broken windows in the winter, or taking a nap on somebody's porch in the summer.
Willem de Kooning
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Spiritually I am wherever my spirit allows me to be, and that is not necessarily in the future... Art never seems to make me peaceful or pure.
Willem de Kooning
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Watercolors is the first and the last thing an artist does.
Willem de Kooning
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In art, one idea is as good as another. If one takes the idea of trembling, for instance, all of a sudden most art starts to tremble. Michelangelo starts to tremble. El Greco starts to tremble. All the Impressionists start to tremble.
Willem de Kooning
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Whatever an artist's personal feelings are, as soon as an artist fills a certain area on the canvas or circumscribes it, he becomes historical. He acts from or upon other artists.
Willem de Kooning
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The idea of space is given to the artist to change if he can. The subject matter in the abstract is space.
Willem de Kooning
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I see the canvas and I begin... It's a necessary evil to get into the work, and it's pretty marvelous to be able to get out of it.
Willem de Kooning
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My interest in desperation lies only in that sometimes I find myself having become desperate. Very seldom do I start out that way. I can see of course that, in the abstract, thinking and all activity is rather desperate.
Willem de Kooning
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Content is a glimpse of something, an encounter like a flash. It's very tiny - very tiny. Content.
Willem de Kooning
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You have to keep on the very edge of something, all the time, or the picture dies.
Willem de Kooning
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Yes, I am influenced by everbody. But every time I put my hands in my pockets I find someone else's fingers there.
Willem de Kooning
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If you're an artist, the problem is to make a picture work whether you are happy or not.
Willem de Kooning
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Art should not have to be a certain way.
Willem de Kooning
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And then there is that one-man movement, Marcel Duchamp for me a truly modern movement because it implies that each artist can do what he thinks he ought to a movement for each person and open for everybody.
Willem de Kooning
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I have to change to stay the same.
Willem de Kooning
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The problem with property is that it takes so much of your time.
Willem de Kooning
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Even abstract shapes must have a likeness
Willem de Kooning
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I feel sometimes an American artist must feel, like a baseball player or something - a member of a team writing American history.
Willem de Kooning
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It's really absurd to make... a human image, with paint, today, when you think about it... But then all of a sudden, it was even more absurd not to do it.
Willem de Kooning